On Tuesday January 9, a fire broke out in The Pacific Palisades, a beautiful, lush, historic neighborhood in Los Angeles. It contains the homes of celebrities, as well as the modest homes of people who bought there decades ago.
The fire started in the Palisades but soon exploded in other neighborhoods. Thousands of homes and businesses have been destroyed, and many people are homeless.
In the 1930s and 1940s, the Palisades was a haven for people who were refugees from Hitler. Thomas Mann had a home there, which is now a retreat for German artists, writers, and scholars. The German government bought both the Mann house and Villa Aurora in the Palisades, which are administered by a foundation and funded by the German government. Villa Aurora sheltered Bertolt Brecht, Charlie Chaplin, and others who escaped the war in Europe. So far, neither has been consumed by the fires. But the fires are close.
Scientists say that the Los Angeles conflagration is the result of climate change.
The devastating wildfires that have ravaged Southern California erupted following a stark shift from wet weather to extremely dry weather — a phenomenon scientists describe as “hydroclimate whiplash.”
New research shows these abrupt wet-to-dry and dry-to-wet swings, which can worsen wildfires, flooding and other hazards, are growing more frequent and intense because of human-caused climate change.
“We’re in a whiplash event now, wet to dry, in Southern California,” said Daniel Swain, a UCLA climate scientist who led the research. “The evidence shows that hydroclimate whiplash has already increased due to global warming, and further warming will bring about even larger increases.”
The extreme weather shift over the last two years in Southern California is one of many such dramatic swings that scientists have documented worldwide in recent years.
But no matter what scientists say, there is a determined group of people who are certain that the cause of the fires was nefarious and had nothing to do with climate change.
I scanned the Twitter feed of Governor Gavin Newsom and read scores of tweets that insisted on the following claims:
1. The state of California recently changed the zoning laws to make it easier to convert single-family lots to apartments for multiple families.
@HustleBitch wrote:
GAVIN NEWSOM WORKING WITH DEVELOPERS TO CHANGE ZONING IN BURN AREAS TO ALLOW MASS APARTMENTS
Newsom is allegedly working with developers to convert zoning in Pacific Palisades from R1 (single family) to R3 (apartments)
CONNECT THE DOTS.
Newsom commented: This is not true.
Dozens of other tweets insisted that the fire was deliberately set to enable the development of massive apartment buildings.
2. The fires got out of control not because of climate change or the Santa Ana winds of 80-100 mph, but because the Fire Department embraced DEI (diversity, equity, and inclusion) policies. Too many gays, Blacks, Hispanics, and women in the leadership of the Fire Department.
3. The fires were so bad because the state and city diverted money from the Fire Department to buy supplies and housing for illegal immigrants. Or to buy needles and drugs for drug addicts.
4. The green agenda is a plot.
@ptmoon tweeted a video of Rosa Koire explaining that the UN green agenda is a dangerous conspiracy.
Rosa Koire Agenda 21 (aka Agenda for the 21st Century) is: “The inventory and control plan for all land, water, minerals, plants, animals, construction, means of production, food, energy, information — and all human beings in the world.”
Another tweet said that Oregon sent 60 fire trucks to fight the blazes, but the trucks and firefighters were detained in Sacramento for emissions testing. Governor Newsom said this was untrue, that Oregon firefighters have been on site battling the fires for days.
Another tweet said:
LOOTING: Newsom and California Democrats literally decriminalized looting baring [sic] police from arresting looters and prosecutors from prosecuting them. Now he’s opposed to looting.
This was retweeted approvingly by Elon Musk as an example of disastrous WOKE policies.
There were scores of tweets attacking Newsom and his WOKE agenda.
Many of the conspiracy theories originated with Trump’s wild claims blaming Newsom for the fires.
This is all so sad. A tragedy of this scale should be a time when Americans unite to offer help, not nitpick and criticize those on the front lines.
Scott Dworkin, a prominent leader in the resistance to the Orange Menace, watched Trump’s self-glorifying rant and reports on it here. I subscribe to his Substack commentary, where this appeared. Just think: we will have to listen to this self-obsessed know-nothing for the next four years. I’m glad to let someone else do it for me.
He wrote:
Yesterday, unhinged madman Donald Trump held what he calls a “press conference.” They’re actually dangerous propaganda sessions.
In order to fight back, we have to stay aware and engaged at a constant. But I don’t want you to have to watch or listen to this bozo, so I summed up what happened for you here.
Donald spent some time pointlessly attacking President Biden. He once again admitted to lying about bringing down grocery prices, and mused that Facebook is likely doing away with fact-checking due to his threats.
He lied about Jack Smith executing people, whined like a baby for being prosecuted for his crimes, and railed against judges who are just doing their jobs. Trump complained about electricity itching—or something—and said he was going to change the name of the Gulf of Mexico to “Gulf of America.” Very original.
“The windmills are driving the whales crazy,” Donald said at one point, for no reason whatsoever.
He even went on some bizarre tirade about water pressure. “It’s called rain,” he blabbed. “It comes down from heaven. And they want to do no water comes out of the shower. It goes drip, drip, drip. So what happens? You’re in the shower 10 times as long.” There are so many things wrong with that word salad.
Trump lied and said Hezbollah was responsible for the violence on Jan 6th—when we all know Donald and his rabid cult followers are to blame. He also nonchalantly promised “major pardons” for the rioters who attacked the Capitol—possibly even for those who assaulted police officers. What a disgrace.
Donny “Cheap Suit” then rambled incoherent threats about using military force to take over Greenland and the Panama Canal, and economic attacks to absorb Canada.
The orange ogre replied to a question about his plans for Gaza negotiations saying, “all hell will break out in the Middle East,” if hostages aren’t released before January 20th. Are you kidding me? That’s not even a “concept of a plan.”
And one of the looniest things that came out of his blubbering mouth was: “We did nothing wrong on anything,” related to the crimes he committed. Remember that every Trump denial is an admission.
This is the sort of unhinged nonsense we will be dealing with as long as Trump is around. And I’ll be right here keeping an eye on him, so you don’t have to.
We’ll be sharing this article with millions of people on 10 social media networks, so we aren’t just singing to the choir.
Today is the fourth anniversary of the worst act of insurrection in our nation’s history. Urged on by President Donald Trump, who insisted that he actually won the election of 2020, a large mob stormed the United States Capitol in hopes of stopping the certification of the election of Joe Biden.
To be clear, Trump is a world-class liar and a very sore loser. He simply refused to admit that he lost the election, fair and square. Biden won the electoral vote and the popular vote. Trump’s lawyer challenged the voting results in multiple states. They filed more than 60 lawsuits, appealed twice to the U.S. Supreme Court, and lost every time. They lost in courts where the judge was appointed by Trump, as well as by other Presidents.
Still, he refused to concede his loss. He spent the past four years claiming that he had been cheated, even though he never produced a scintilla of evidence to support his lies. Several of his lawyers were disciplined or disbarred. His personal lawyer Rudy Giuliani was disbarred and also fined $148 million for defaming two election workers in Georgia. Although he had declared that he is bankrupt, Giuliani continues to turn over his assets to the women he defamed. Trump cannot pardon civil judgments, so Giuliani is likely to lose not only his law license but all of his assets.
Yet Trump survived, having persuaded his faithful base that he had been cheated in 2020, despite his lack of evidence and multiple indictments and convictions.
History will say this about Trump:
He was the first President who refused to participate in the peaceful transfer of power to the winner of the election.
He was the first President to inspire an insurrection against the government.
He will be the first convicted felon ever to serve as President.
His insurrection and his name will live forever in infamy.
Quite an ignominious legacy.
To read an excellent article by Robert Reich on the same topic, open this link.
He wrote recently, as posted on the blog of the Network for Public Education:
Maurice Cunningham finds that looking at the Boston Globe tells us too much about the folks who think education is just to prepare children to become useful tools for business. Reposted with permission.
When I was a kid in the Sixties we’d occasionally hear stories about some poor Japanese soldier, abandoned on a Pacific island after WWII, finally being rescued while believing he was still fighting the war. That’s sort of where the Boston Globe’s post-MCAS coverage is. But as a lesson in the biased media approach to interest group coverage, it is a real education.
The latest is by reporter Mandy McLaren, With no more MCAS requirement, graduation standards vary widely among state’s largest districts. What interests me is the sources used in the story, which include a heavy presence of billionaire funded and tax deductible “non-profits” aka interest groups. That’s because non-profit, while it sounds eleemosynary ( I just wanted to use that word in a sentence) actually represents the policy preferences of the moneyed few; or as the media like to say the Massachusetts business community; or as I like to say: capital.
Erika Giampietro, executive director for the Massachusetts Alliance for Early College, said she hopes whatever path the state takes next focuses on the ‘competencies’ students graduate with, especially those that truly matter in the real world.”
“[Employers] are not saying, ‘I wish kids had taken two years of foreign language, four years of English and four years of math.’ They’re saying, ‘Yeah, kids aren’t coming with strong enough executive functioning and clear enough communication skills and showing up to work every day and realizing how important that is to be on time,‘” Giampietro said.
Funders include Gates, Boston Foundation, Fidelity Charitable Gift (also in Puffs Up).
Employers=business=capital. Ms. Giampietro offers the interest group frame: employers would like taxpayer paid employee training (while not increasing taxes). The focus is employers and not children. If you read enough of these stories, that comes through. Not that kids should be introduced to foreign cultures, discover a love of literature or art, or heaven forbid, question the prevailing structures of society. Such concerns are not the “the real world” issues of business.
The article did quote Max Page, president of Massachusetts Teachers Association. But when you also quote two superintendents who miss MCAS and three eleemosynary business group interests, well . . . does three from capital equal one from labor?
Money never sleeps. Follow the money.
“Imagine movie critics who either did not know, or did not care to know, that movies have producers, script writers, directors, financiers, or casting directors, and so based their reviews on the premise that it was the actors alone who created the storyline, dialogue and mise en scene, and that the most successful actors were those who best understood the audience. That is essentially how all politics is covered in 21st century America.”—Michael Podhorzer.
Politico posted an article today claiming that Robert F. Kennedy Jr. was gaining approval by focusing on his criticism of Big Pharma and Big Ag.
The article claims that RFK is a normal politician! He wants people to eat healthy foods!He is against ultra processed foods, even if you saw the photo of him eating a Big Mac on Trump’s plane.
Despite initial resistance, Bobby is winning people over:
Less than a month later, however, some of Kennedy’s other views — especially on food — are surprisingly taking root on Capitol Hill. There’s still considerable resistance to Kennedy — and no certainty that he gets confirmed by the Senate. But his attacks on Big Ag and Big Pharma are resonating and RFK is finding allies among some populists who share the goal of taking on big corporate interests.
Ignore the fact that he is opposed to vaccines. Ignore the fact that dozens of children died in Samoa after he brought news that (in his view) measles vaccines cause measles.
Ignore the fact that he recently claimed that heroin improved his school performance.
Shame on Politico.
Robert F. Kennedy Jr. should not run our nation’s healthcare system. Maybe a food safety program. But NOT the Department of Health and Human Services!
Mercedes Schneider is a high school teacher in Louisiana who holds a doctorate in statistics and research methodology. It’s no secret that she is also a devout Christian who takes her faith seriously, so seriously that she doesn’t try to impose it on anyone else. As a veteran teacher, she writes with authority and keen intellect about education.
Project 2025 identifies itself as “The Presidential Transition Project,” further described as “an agenda prepared by and for conservatives who will be ready on Day One of the next Administration to save our country”:
The Heritage Foundation is once again facilitating this work, but as our dozens of partners and hundreds of authors will attest, this book is the work of the entire conservative movement.
The next conservative President will enter office on January 20, 2025, with a simple choice: greatness or failure. It will be a daunting test, but no more so than every other generation of Americans has faced and passed. The Conservative Promise represents the best effort of the conservative movement in 2023—and the next conservative President’s last opportunity to save our republic.
THE MORE PEOPLE learn about it, the more unpopular and politically toxic Project 2025 has proven to be. This has led the Trump and Vance campaign to attempt to distance itself from the effort. Former Trump adviser Stephen Miller now says he had “zero involvement with Project 2025,” despite appearing in a promotional video. And just today, The Intercept discovered two more conservative groups that have quietly bowed out from the controversial 900-page manifesto — including a national anti-abortion organization.
Miller’s group, America First Legal Foundation, was one of the first organizations to jump ship from the Project 2025 advisory board. Last week, America First Legal asked to be removed from the Project 2025 advisory board webpage. The organization was part of Project 2025 since at least June 2022, when the Heritage Foundation first announced the advisory board’s formation.
America First Legal staff were deeply involved in writing and editing the Project 2025 playbook. Its vice president and general counsel, Gene Hamilton, drafted an entire chapter about the Justice Department, which proposes launching a “campaign” to criminalize mailing abortion pills. In a footnote, Hamilton thanked “the staff at America First Legal Foundation,” who he wrote deserved “special mention for their assistance while juggling other responsibilities.” …
America First Legal did not respond to questions about why it asked to be removed from the Project 2025 advisory board despite its prior participation.
As of Tuesday afternoon, Americans United for Life, an anti-abortion group, and the Mackinac Center for Public Policy, a Michigan think tank, were among the more than 100 groups listed on the Project 2025 website as part of its advisory board. By Wednesday, Americans United for Life and the Mackinac Center had vanished.
Both organizations were relatively recent additions to the Project 2025 coalition. The Heritage Foundation announced they had joined in February 2024, several months after the massive playbook was released.
Neither organization would elaborate as to why it had joined the Project 2025 board in the first place or why it was exiting it now.
Seems like far-right conservatives have a history of not really wanting the public aware of those conservative plans and schemes.
It should come as no surprise that ALEC is a Project 2025 advisory board member:
Project 2025 is the conservative, American white Evangelical Christian plan for operating government. Below is a “note” from Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025 director, Paul Dans:
Let me offer some excerpts. Not many, for it does not take much reading to realize that the Project 2025 overarching goal is to force all of America into a white Evangelical Christian mold.
A smidge from Heritage Foundation president, Kevin Roberts’, foreword:
PROMISE #1: RESTORE THE FAMILY AS THE CENTERPIECE OF AMERICAN LIFE AND PROTECT OUR CHILDREN. The next conservative President must get to work pursuing the true priority of politics-the well-being of the American family. In many ways, the entire point of centralizing political power is to subvert the family. Its purpose is to replace people’s natural loves and loyalties with unnatu- ral ones. You see this in the popular left-wing aphorism, “Government is simply the name we give to the things we choose to do together.” But in real life, most of the things people “do together” have nothing to do with government. These are the mediating institutions that serve as the building blocks of any healthy society. Marriage. Family. Work. Church. School. Volunteering. The name real people give to the things we do together is community, not government. Our lives are full of interwoven, overlapping communities, and our individual and collective happiness depends upon them. But the most important community in each of our lives-and the life of the nation— is the family. Today, the American family is in crisis. Forty percent of all children are born to unmarried mothers, including more than 70 percent of black children. There is no government program that can replace the hole in a child’s soul cut out by the absence of a father. Fatherlessness is one of the principal sources of Ameri- can poverty, crime, mental illness, teen suicide, substance abuse, rejection of the church, and high school dropouts. So many of the problems government programs are designed to solve-but can’t-are ultimately problems created by the crisis of marriage and the family. The world has never seen a thriving, healthy, free, and prosperous society where most children grow up without their married parents. If current trends continue, we are heading toward social implosion. Furthermore, the next conservative President must understand that using gov- ernment alone to respond to symptoms of the family crisis is a dead end. Federal power must instead be wielded to reverse the crisis and rescue America’s kids from familial breakdown. The Conservative Promise includes dozens of specific policies to accomplish this existential task. Some are obvious and long-standing goals like eliminating marriage penalties in federal welfare programs and the tax code and installing work requirements for food stamps. But we must go further. It’s time for policymakers to elevate family authority, formation, and cohesion as their top priority and even use government power, including through the tax code, to restore the American family. Today the Left is threatening the tax-exempt status of churches and charities that reject woke progressivism. They will soon turn to Christian schools and clubs with the same totalitarian intent. The next conservative President must make the institutions of American civil society hard targets for woke culture warriors. This starts with deleting the terms sexual orientation and gender identity (“SOGI”), diversity, equity, and inclusion (“DEI”), gender, gender equality, gender equity, gender awareness, gender-sensi- tive, abortion, reproductive health, reproductive rights, and any other term used to deprive Americans of their First Amendment rights out of every federal rule, agency regulation, contract, grant, regulation, and piece of legislation that exists. Pornography, manifested today in the omnipresent propagation of transgender ideology and sexualization of children, for instance, is not a political Gordian knot inextricably binding up disparate claims about free speech, property rights, sexual liberation, and child welfare. It has no claim to First Amendment protection. Its purveyors are child predators and misogynistic exploiters of women. Their product is as addictive as any illicit drug and as psychologically destructive as any crime. Pornography should be outlawed. The people who produce and distribute it should be imprisoned. Educators and public librarians who purvey it should be classed as registered sex offenders. And telecommunications and technology firms that facilitate its spread should be shuttered. In our schools, the question of parental authority over their children’s education is a simple one: Schools serve parents, not the other way around. That is, of course, the best argument for universal school choice-a goal all conservatives and con- servative Presidents must pursue. But even before we achieve that long-term goal, parents’ rights as their children’s primary educators should be non-negotiable in American schools. States, cities and counties, school boards, union bosses, principals, and teachers who disagree should be immediately cut off from federal funds. The noxious tenets of “critical race theory” and “gender ideology” should be excised from curricula in every public school in the country. These theories poison our children, who are being taught on the one hand to affirm that the color of their skin fundamentally determines their identity and even their moral status while on the other they are taught to deny the very creatureliness that inheres in being human and consists in accepting the givenness of our nature as men or women.
Schneider continues:
Free the churches, imprison the librarians.
Roberts was in the news for stating that an “ongoing American Revolution” will “remain bloodless if the left allows it to be.” According to The Hill, that comment caused “blowback” for Roberts and the Heritage Foundation.
None of Jesus’ ministry involved any political agenda, much less the government-driven denigration of “other” or the imposing of His will on any human being.
On September 9, Lisa Dye of Public Notice wrote about why Brazilian authorities banished Twitter (or, as its proprietor calls it, X). She wrote that he sticks up for his rightwing buddies, not free speech. In 2022, Brazil’s strongman leader Bolsonaro bestowed a prestigious national award on Musk.
She writes:
As of this writing Brazil’s 215 million citizens cannot access X (or “twitter” as we’ll call it). And yet, they are still living in the dumbest timeline.
Elon Musk, the world’s foremost “free speech absolutist,” has picked a fight with the Brazilian government over its demand that he censor rightwing misinformation. It’s a classic situation of “why can’t they both lose?” But right now, the only ones losing are the Brazilian people.
The saga began with former Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro, a rightwing conservative who lost his bid for reelection in 2022 to leftwing politician Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva. On January 8 of last year, Bolsonaro’s supporters stormed Congress and the Supreme Court in a failed attempt to keep him in power.
The reaction of the Brazilian government to January 8 stands in stark contrast to official reaction to January 6 in the US. In Brazil, hundreds of people were immediately arrested, including some senior government officials. Bolsonaro was barred from running for office again. And Supreme Court justice Alexandre de Moraes led an operation that was both investigatory and preventative. In short, they wanted to figure out why their government had been attacked, and they wanted to make damn sure that it never happened again.
To that end, Judge de Moraes sought to banish rightwing incitement, the so-called “digital militias,” from social media. In sealed rulings, he ordered Meta, Instagram, and Telegram to remove posts and users who flogged misinformation about the attack on government and advocated for Bolonsaro’s return.
Meanwhile, Bolsonaro fled to Florida, where he launched a second act as hero of the American right. The Brazilian leader spews the same jingoistic populism, fueled by hatred of minorities and LGBTQ+ people, that animates Trumpism. He even consulted Steve Bannon on his 2018 campaign. And perhaps most importantly, he reinforces their bedrock belief that election fraud is rampant.
As former congressman and current Trump Media CEO Devin Nunes told CNN, “The way his narrative is built, to a large extent, as a copy or a mirror image of the narrative that they have in the US is very useful in the sense of showing people this is happening in other places, too. This proves the whole idea that there is a global conspiracy, a global leftwing conspiracy to keep us, the people who represent the real people, out of power.”
However, Musk has 20 million Twitter subscribers in Brazil, and they were drifting to other platforms, like Mark Zuckerberg’s Threads. Worse, the Brazilian Supreme Court took $2 million from Musk’s Starlink to satisfy its claims against Musk’s X. What did Musk do when threatened with fines and the loss of market share?
After defying court orders in Brazil for three weeks, Mr. Musk’s social network, X, has capitulated. In a court filing on Friday night, the company’s lawyers said that X had complied with orders from Brazil’s Supreme Court in the hopes that the court would lift a block on its site.
The decision was a surprise move by Mr. Musk, who owns and controls X, after he said he had refused to obey what he called illegal orders to censor voices on his social network. Mr. Musk had dismissed local employees and refused to pay fines. The court responded by blocking X across Brazil last month.
Now, X’s lawyers said the company had done exactly what Mr. Musk vowed not to: take down accounts that a Brazilian justice ordered removed because the judge said they threatened Brazil’s democracy. X also complied with the justice’s other demands, including paying fines and naming a new formal representative in the country, the lawyers said.
Brazil’s Supreme Court confirmed X’s moves in a filing on Saturday, but said the company had not filed the proper paperwork. It gave X five days to send further documentation.
The abrupt about-face from Mr. Musk in Brazil appeared to be a defeat for the outspoken businessman and his self-designed image as a warrior for free speech. Mr. Musk and his company had loudly and harshly criticized Brazil’s Supreme Court for months, even publicly releasing some of its sealed orders, but neither had publicly mentioned their reversal by Saturday morning.
The moment showed how, in the yearslong power struggle between tech giants and nation-states, governments have been able to keep the upper hand.
Mr. Musk has had to come to terms with that reality in other countries, including India and Turkey, where his social network complied with orders to censor certain posts. But in Brazil and Australia, he complained about government orders he disagreed with and accused local officials of censorship. His company’s responses to governments have often been in line with his personal politics.
In the U.S., where Musk will never be censored, he has restored accounts of neo-Nazis, election deniers, and COVID science deniers. His own Twitter feed is an advertising platform for Trump. He frequently highlights outrageous pro-Trump, anti-Harris messages.
It’s sad to think that this hateful, bigoted man “owns” the world’s town square, where no one ever fact-checks him or moderates his Tweets.
Just proves, as if proof were needed, that money is power.
Peter Greene examines a proposed amendment to the state constitution in Colorado and its whacko implications. He urges voters to say NO.
He writes:
While other states are stumbling over constitutional language that aims public dollars at public schools (e.g. South Carolina and Kentucky), voucher fans in Colorado have proposed a constitutional amendment that comes up for a vote soon. And it is a ridiculously ill-conceived and hastily crafted mess.
The language is simple enough– here’s the whole text, originally known as Initiative 138 and now as Amendment 40.
SECTION 1. In the constitution of the state of Colorado, add section, 18 to article IX as follows: Section 18. Education – School Choice
(1) PURPOSE AND FINDINGS. THE PEOPLE OF THE STATE OF COLORADO HEREBY FIND AND DECLARE THAT ALL CHILDREN HAVE THE RIGHT TO EQUAL OPPORTUNITY TO ACCESS A QUALITY EDUCATION; THAT PARENTS HAVE THE RIGHT TO DIRECT THE EDUCATION OF THEIR CHILDREN; AND THAT SCHOOL CHOICE INCLUDES NEIGHBORHOOD, CHARTER, PRIVATE, AND HOME SCHOOLS, OPEN ENROLLMENT OPTIONS, AND FUTURE INNOVATIONS IN EDUCATION.
(2) EACH K-12 CHILD HAS THE RIGHT TO SCHOOL CHOICE.
Why does Colorado, a state that has long offered many forms of school choice, even need this? Supporters of the amendment are arguing that they are trying to enshrine and protect choice, just in case those naughty Democrats tried to roll it back some day (Colorado’s Dems once tossed out the pro-choice, not-really-Democrats Democrats for Education Reform). And though they aren’t saying this part out loud, the amendment would be a great set-up for school vouchers.
The language proposed is, however, strictly bananapants. And I’ll bet you dollars to donuts that the people who would most regret passing this amendment would be those who support it.
Let’s say I want to send my low-achieving, non-Christian child to a top-level Christian school. Let’s further presume that I can’t afford even a fraction of the tuition cost. Does this amendment mean that the school has to accept them, and that the state has to foot the entire tuition bill? Wouldn’t any answer other than yes be denying my constitutional to equal opportunity to access a quality education and my constitutional right to direct my child’s education? Does this mean that to have full access the state must also transport my child anywhere I want them to go to school?
What if East Egg Academy has far more applicants than it has capacity? Must it scratch its entire admissions policy and use a lottery instead?
The major obstacles to school choice are not state policies. The major obstacles are, and have always been, cost, location, and the school’s own discriminatory policies. Virtually all voucher policies are set up to protect those discriminatory policies. Wouldn’t an amendment like this require those to be wiped out?
Wouldn’t this language amount to a state takeover of all charter and private schools?
And that’s not all. Wouldn’t this amendment also allow parents to intrude into every classroom. If I have a constitutional right to direct my child’s education, does that not mean that I can tell my child’s science teacher to stop teaching evolution? Or start teaching evolution? Can I demand a different approach to teaching American history? How about prepositions? And how will a classroom teacher even function if every child in the classroom comes with a parent who has a constitutional right to direct their education?
You can say that’s silly, that “obviously” that’s not what the amendment means. But that’s what it says, at least until some series of bureaucrats and courts decide what exactly “direct the education of their children” means.
Kevin Welner (National Education Policy Center)has it exactly right— “It’s really a ‘full employment for lawyers’ act.”
Supporters say this doesn’t establish a right to public funding of private schools, and I suppose they’re sort of correct in the sense that this does not so much establish a right to public funding of private schools so much as it establishes an obligation for public funding of private schools as well as obliterating private school autonomy. Unless, of course, some judge steps in to find that the language doesn’t mean what it says, which is, I suppose, not impossible.
Nobody on any side of the school choice debate should be voting for this amendment. It’s exactly the kind of lawmaking you get from people who have wrapped meaning in particular rhetoric for so long that they have forgotten that the words of their rhetoric have actual meanings outside the meanings that they have habitually assigned them. Here’s hoping the people of Colorado avoid this really bad idea.
Catherine Kim wrote a fascinating account in Politico of the Russian program to sow division in the United States and to influence the 2024 elections. Kim interviews a Finnish scholar of disinformation who says that Finnish children are taught media literacy in school to help them spot propaganda. His final advice: Turn off the computer; take a walk; play; live your life.
She writes:
A DOJ indictment on Wednesday alleged that content created and distributed by a conservative social media company called Tenet Media was actually funded by Russia. Two Russian government employees funneled nearly $10 million to Tenet Media, which hired high-profile conservative influencers such as Tim Pool, Benny Johnson and Dave Rubin to produce videos and other content that stoked political divisions. The indictment alleges that the influencers — who say they were unaware of Tenet’s ties to Russia — were paid upward of $400,000 a month.
These “conservative influencers” were chosen because they have large and devoted fans who believe whatever content they create. They apparently didn’t know who was footing the bill, but were no doubt thrilled to be paid $100,000 for each video they produced, up to four per month. Why ask questions when the pay is so good?
Now that they know who their sugar daddy was, will they rethink any of their views?
Should we think about teaching our children to be discerning consumers of social media so they are not taken in by propaganda?
Margaret Sullivan was the ombudsman (public editor) for the New York Times. She writes a blog called American Crisis. There are so many amazing blogs these days that it’s hard to keep track. This one appeared in my email today, and it speaks to a debate among readers on this blog about whether the media, and most especially The New York Times, normalizes Trump’s behavior and ideas in an effort to be “fair.” I’m subscribing.
She writes:
I once asked Jill Abramson, the former top editor of the New York Times, to name the best reporters she had ever encountered. I recall she mentioned her friend and co-author Jane Mayer — definitely on my list, too — and a few others. Mayer’s book, “Dark Money,” about the Koch Brothers, is a classic of investigative reporting.
Another one was James Risen, the renowned investigative reporter formerly of the New York Times, and later at the Intercept. I agreed again, particularly because of an investigation that Risen did during the George W. Bush administration about the government surveillance of American citizens through warrantless wiretapping. (There’s quite a backstory there, but suffice it to say that Times editors held back the investigation for many months after the administration claimed that publishing would threaten national security; Risen eventually forced the hand of his editors, resulting in the publication of the blockbuster co-authored with Eric Lichtblau — and it won a Pulitzer Prize.)
I heard from Risen a few days ago, as I do from time to time; I got to know him while I was the Times public editor or ombudswoman. He wrote to express his outrage at his former employer for a recent story. I pay particular attention to him as a former Timesman himself and a journalist of integrity.
“At first, I thought this was a parody,” Risen told me. Unfortunately, it wasn’t. Even more unfortunately, the lack of judgment it displays is all too common in the Times and throughout Big Journalism as mainstream media covers Donald Trump’s campaign for president.
“Harris and Trump Have Housing Ideas. Economists Have Doubts,” is the headline of the story he was angered by. If you pay attention to epidemic of “false equivalence” in the media — equalizing the unequal for the sake of looking fair — you might have had a sense of what was coming.
The story takes seriously Trump’s plan for the mass deportation of immigrants as part of his supposed “affordable housing” agenda. Here’s some both-sidesing for you, as the paper of record describes Harris’s tax cuts to spur construction and grants to first-time home buyers, and Trump’s deportation scheme. “Their two visions of how to solve America’s affordable housing shortage have little in common …But they do share one quality: Both have drawn skepticism from outside economists.” The story notes that experts are particularly skeptical about Trump’s idea, but the story’s framing and its headline certainly equate the two.
There’s only one reason I disagree with Risen’s reaction. He wrote: “This story is unbelievable.”
I wish.
Stories like this run rampant in the Times, and far beyond. It matters more in the Times because — even in this supposed “post-media era” — the country’s biggest newspaper still sets the tone and wields tremendous influence. And, of course, the Times has tremendous resources, a huge newsroom and the ability to hire the best in the business. Undeniably, it does a lot of excellent work.
But its politics coverage often seems broken and clueless — or even blatantly pro-Trump. There’s so much of this false-balance nonsense in the Times that there’s a Twitter (X) account devoted to mocking it, called New York Times Pitchbot.
Sometimes, sadly, it’s hard to tell the difference between the satire and the reality. Hence, Risen’s parody line.
At the same time, when Trump does something even more outrageous than usual, the mainstream press can’t seem to give it the right emphasis. Last week, NPR broke the news that Trump and his campaign staff apparently violated federal law — and every norm of decency — by trying to film a campaign video at Arlington National Cemetery and getting into a scuffle with a dutiful cemetery employee.
Of course, the story got picked up elsewhere and got significant attention. But did it get the huge and sustained treatment that — let’s just say — Hillary Clinton’s email practices did in 2016? Definitely not, as a former Marine, Ben Kesling, wrote in Columbia Journalism Review:
“Lumped together, the reporting this week left readers and listeners, especially with no knowledge of the military, at a loss to understand what actually happened — and crucially, why it mattered so much. The Trump campaign had successfully muddied the waters by alleging that the photographer had been invited to the event by family members of soldiers buried there.”
It came off, he wrote, “like a bureaucratic mix-up or some tedious violation of protocol,” not a deeply disrespectful moral failure, which it surely was. “The sacred had been profaned.”
The political cartoonist Darrin Bell, however, certainly got the point across in a time-lapse video cartoon. Check it out here. (Open the link to see this).
Why does this keep happening, not just in the Times but far beyond?
And what’s more — what’s worse — they don’t seem to want to change. Editors and reporters, with a few exceptions, really don’t see the problem as they normalize Trump. Nor do they appear to listen to valid criticism. They may not even be aware of it, or may think, “well, when both sides are mad at us, we must be doing it right.” Maybe they simply fear being labeled liberal.
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All of this matters immensely as the extraordinarily important campaign for president heads into its last couple of months. I’ll be continuing to monitor coverage here, and trying to find ways to improve it.
Diane Ravitch's blog 